Friday, June 12, 2015

The second installment of the American Pancake Vloggy Thingy includes bad clapping sound effects and some thoughts on the recent supposed "angry" open letter by Marc Ribot in response to Steve Albini's thoughts on the obsolescence of copyright law visa vie intellectual property rights on one's music / art / creations. I think at this point Albini is waxing poetic on the subject and just throwing it all out there. I personally cannot imagine any time when artist's will not "own" their creations (musical or otherwise). Whether they make money from their art or are able to keep others from freely distributing their creations for profit is another matter entirely. One thing is for sure, there is no other time in history where is is more important for musicians / bands etc to foster and nurture their relationship with their audience because if they do, that audience will gladly support them by purchasing their art and other ancillary merchandise. I also touch on vinyl as a significant and smart way to distribute their art because, well, people certainly cannot distribute hard copies like music files.
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Robb

I’m writing as a recording artist, musician, and activist with c3, the Content Creators Coalition, a working-artist-run organization dedicated to economic justice in the digital domain.

In a recent Billboard article, you referred to copyright as an “expired concept”.

You further stated that:

“… the intellectual construct of copyright and intellectual property ownership is not realistic…That old copyright model of the person who wrote something down owns it and anyone else who wants to use it or see it has to pay him, I think that model has expired.”

If you truly believe that “Ideas, once expressed, become part of the common mentality. And music, once expressed, becomes part of the common environment…”, are you willing to sign a Creative Commons license placing your entire catalogue in the public domain?

Or are you just another lousy hypocrite shilling for Google and other huge tech corporations who have made billions in ad-based profits while using our work, often without paying us or asking our permission, as click bait to increase their advertising rates?

Working artists and musicians, at least those of us who can’t afford to make another record unless the last one paid its production costs, await your response.